A novel that began its life tricking readers into believing it was a genuine recovered memoir has won the 2026 International Booker Prize, the world’s most prestigious award for translated fiction.
Taiwan Travelogue, by the Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (a pen name originally shared by twin sisters, continued by the surviving sister after the other’s death in 2015), was praised by judges as “captivating” and “slyly sophisticated.” But the “sly” part may be an understatement.
When the book was first published in Taiwan in 2020, its cover read: “written by Aoyama Chizuko, translated by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ.” Many readers started reading it believing they had read an authentic piece of literary history, a long-lost memoir by a celebrated Japanese writer who travelled to colonial Taiwan in 1938. They felt hoodwinked when it gradually dawned on them that neither the author nor the original Japanese text existed.
A book disguised as a memoir
One can hardly blame them for being taken in. Pick up Taiwan Travelogue, and one finds, before the story begins, a scholarly introduction by a wānshēng scholar — a person of Japanese heritage born in colonial Taiwan, belonging fully to neither culture — an afterword by the author’s adopted daughter dated 1970, a translator’s note from 1977, and an editor’s note from 1990.
The novel presents itself as the recovered memoir of Aoyama Chizuko, who falls in love with the island, and with her Taiwanese interpreter, Chi-chan. None of it is, of course, true, but the reader does not realise it till the end.
The author’s own name is part of the trick
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King won the 2026 International Booker Prize. (Booker Prize/Generated using AI)
In Mandarin, “Shuāng-zǐ” means “twins.” The name belonged to two sisters, Ruò-tsí and Ruò-huī. Ruò-huī died in 2015, before the novel was written, and the book is the surviving sister’s tribute to her. The book is dedicated to “Yáng Ruò-huī, the younger of the twin sisters,” which, at first glance, seems like your garden variety acknowledgement until one realises the author is dedicating the book to her deceased twin.
The 2020 translator’s note, written in Ruò-huī’s fictional voice, reveals the inversion at the novel’s heart. “Very special thanks go to my late older sister,” the note reads, voiced as Ruò-huī. “I, the Ruò-huī half of ‘Shuāng-zǐ,’ may have held the pen… but it is in fact a product of our shared work.”
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The sisters visited Japan together in 2014, when they went to the Hayashi Fumiko Memorial Reference Room in the Former Moji Mitsui Club in Kitakyūshū and saw a postcard from someone named “Aoyama Chizuko,” the same name the book would later use for its fictional memoirist.
Footnotes that correct the narrator
Surrounding the faux memoir is a scholarly apparatus that quietly reads against Aoyama’s grain. As the book’s English translator, Lin King, said in her acceptance speech: “In this book there are translators, footnotes, forwards and afterwards, and three systems of pronunciation for the same written character.”
Footnotes, some attributed to Yáng as the fictional translator, others added by King, supply context the narrator omits or does not know. One footnote explains that the two types of schools Aoyama notices in Taiwan (one for Japanese children, one for Taiwanese) determined which language children were examined in, and therefore which futures were open to them. Another notes that a word Aoyama casually uses for China had by then become derogatory.
As the book’s English translator, Lin King, noted in her acceptance speech: “In this book there are translators, footnotes, forwards and afterwards, and three systems of pronunciation for the same written character.”
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A story rooted in colonial history
Taiwan was a Japanese colony for exactly 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. The idea of a distinct Taiwanese national identity, separate from both Japan and mainland China, was forged in part during this occupation.
Yáng’s fictional memoirist, Aoyama, is presented as warm, curious, and genuinely enchanted by Taiwan. She arrives at Taichū station, abandons her official escort, gets lost in a street market, and is rescued by Chi-chan, who becomes her interpreter and eventually the great love of the book. Aoyama spends her days pestering colonial officials to let her eat street food rather than elaborate banquets, food, she says, that has been “tailored or even invented to suit Mainlander tastes.”
A final twist in the fiction
The fictional translator’s note from 1977 is attributed to “Wáng Chiēn-hò,” the same name as Chi-chan, the Taiwanese interpreter at the novel’s heart. The fiction imagines that, decades later, the woman who could not speak freely in 1938 became the first person to render the Japanese author’s account into a language her own people could read.
The £50,000 International Booker Prize is split equally between author and translator. In the case of Taiwan Travelogue, where the author disguised herself as a translator, the fictional translator shares a name with the fictional subject, and the real translator added her own footnotes to footnotes already attributed to a fictional translator, the distinction is blurred.
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As the surviving sister wrote in her note, describing the novel as a piece of amber, “one that coagulates both the ‘real’ past and the ‘made-up’ ideals.”
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King won the 2026 International Booker Prize. (Booker Prize/Generated using AI)